One Trick that got us almost 10,000 page views

Whether you are new to blogging or have been blogging for a while, there will always be things that will amaze you about what people read and respond to. Yesterday, I had one of these moments, I was looking at some analytics from our blog and realized that there is a single trick that got us over 27% of our traffic in the month of February.

Top 10 lists get traffic to your blog

The single trick was to use a top 10 list in one of our posts. This is actually a post from April 2013 that gradually picked up traffic and became more and more popular every month. It’s not only the most viewed page but people spend over 5 minutes on average on this page.

Why top 10 lists are so powerful

There are a few reasons for the success of this format. Here are the most significant ones:

When a user searches in Google, he or she gets 10 results and needs to pick one. Choosing a top ten list seems like the least risky option and so a post like that will get twice as many clicks as a specific post. This is especially true if the list comes from a trusted domain or author.

Reading through the page is easier for a user, he or she can just select to read one or two items on the list rather than committing to read a long blog post.

Users that read through two or three items in the list and liked them automatically assume that the entire list is good. It means that people are willing to share the post after 30 seconds compared to 2-3 minutes with a regular post.

If some of the items in the list are references to other vendors or blogs, you are likely to receive some love back.

How to create a good list post

Creating a list and making it into a blog post is mainly around research. It’s actually not that complicated. There are a few kinds of lists you can make:

Most effective tips – this mainly requires googling “tips for …..” and just aggregating the information.

Popular vendors – again using Google or finding some directory of vendors.

Top Influencers – listing people is a very powerful concept. Some magazines list the sexiest people but you might want to go with another attribute if your blog is more business oriented.

That’s it. Please let me know what lists you come up with. Feel free to post them in the comments or tweet to @y_nizan and I promise to share these in a special Top 10 Top-10-lists post :-).

Raised in the Kibbutz and reborn in the city, Yaniv is a certified entre-parent-neur. When he’s not busy doing SEO, content marketing, administration, QA, fund raising, customer support… [stop to breathe], you can find Yaniv snowboarding down the slopes of France and hiking with his kids.
Yaniv holds a B.Sc. in Computer Science and Management from Tel Aviv University. He is also an avid blogger and a speaker at industry events. Before SOOMLA, Yaniv co-founded EyeView and INTENTClick.

At SOOMLA we aim to give mobile app publishers insights into the revenue they are making from advertising. We specifically help track revenue per user, per segment, per cohort and per traffic source. With the help of this data, we want to help facilitate better monetization and marketing decisions for our clients.